


From Water Into Dust

by severinne



Category: Priest (2011 movie)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Flogging, Light Bondage, M/M, Religious Content, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-03
Updated: 2012-06-03
Packaged: 2017-11-06 21:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/severinne/pseuds/severinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>”I am the bringer of the tide. I am the wave that will wash clean this unclean world.”</em> Suspended at the point of the knife, Priest remembers the Brother he once knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Water Into Dust

Each brutal impact forced itself too quick past his consciousness, one shockwave riding the next, crashing and breaking over his meticulously trained instincts.

Lucy knocked to the floor.

His back slammed to the wall.

The knife punched through skin and muscle and to the wall again.

Breath and sense failed against the agony filling his chest. He couldn’t think, couldn’t _fight_ , only stare disbelievingly into eyes he had known so well before they had jaundiced with evil.

He throbbed and burned around the cold of the knife, struggled to read meaning into the curl of lips that drank in his every twitch of pain with all the rapture of a monsignor tasting his communion wine. A revelation rushed down his spine the longer the moment dragged itself out – this could have been done quickly, could have pierced him through the heart and given him a clean death. This wound was far more personal than that – it kept him mercilessly alive, conscious to every flicker of obscene emotion contorting his former Brother’s face.

Conscious, at least, until his Brother turned away and he slumped into oblivion, held up by nothing but the enigma of that knife.

\+ + +

At the height of the war as he had known it, there was a cargo train that carried their monthly water ration from the coast to their training centre. He had never seen the ocean himself unless the tepid swirl inside those barrels counted, and judging by the sneering look of the boy packed in with that month’s ration, he supposed it wasn’t the same knowledge at all.

At first, he was certain the clergy had made a poor choice: more young man than boy, really, mutely defiant yet shyly staring at his own feet, too fearful to look directly upon a Priest. As he dutifully recited the same orientation he himself had received two years ago, he let his attention wander from the empty words moving his mouth to take in the heavy eyebrows, the cheekbones straining beneath too-smooth skin, the sulk of his full lower lip.

Once the Church had claimed a warrior’s body and name, it was customary to address them as Child until training had elevated them to the title of Priest. It was an affectation that had fit him poorly so late in life and seemed equally ill-suited to this grave creature, yet that sullen frown already had him estimating the number of beatings it would take to strike some discipline into his heart when the boy dropped, silent and swift to his knees.

His recitation stuck in his throat, caught between alarm and some other heretical response in the depths of his belly. He drew a sharp breath, ready to call for the medics to attend to their new arrival’s heat stroke when he noticed the steadiness of his shoulders beneath the threadbare shirt, the fingers dragging across the cracked earth between their feet.

As one meditative hand swept up a sampling of dirt and let it gust away on the hot breeze, he finally understood. The boy hadn’t bowed his head out of fear or deference; he was transfixed, fascinated by the arid land he found beneath his feet this far from home.

‘I never believed it, whenever I heard the stories.’ They were the first words he had heard from the younger man, in a low voice coloured by a subtle drawl. ‘All the water stripped from the land… I couldn’t begin to imagine it.’

Struck by a backward compassion, he abandoned the customary induction and moved instead to explanation. ‘At the height of our war with the vampire, the Church saw fit to make the land as inhospitable as possible to our foe. Temperatures were artificially–’

‘I know _why_ , Priest.’ The boy sprung upright again, all the quiet warmth in his voice replaced with biting anger. ‘I know all the stupid, short-sighted reasons why the Church condemned my people to a lifetime of purifying the ocean and sending it all inland with hardly anything left for ourselves once they realized they can’t live without water to make their fucking wine–’

He acted swiftly and entirely in the boy’s own interest – far better a bloodied nose now than weeks of reprogramming at the hands of the clergy – but he knew by the flat, deadly glare he received as the boy crumpled to the ground and spat his bright blood upon the dead earth that he would receive no thanks for his intervention.

‘Don’t get up right away, Child,’ he warned solemnly, not entirely without sympathy. ‘That dust is your home now.’

\+ + +

He coughed weakly into semi-consciousness, felt his own blood burst over his cracked lips. An eye for an eye, perhaps, if his Brother’s resentment that first day had always stung as sharp as a crucifixion concentrated within the single spiteful thrust of the knife.

This at least was a language he understood, a shorthand they came to share as Brothers. His own savage flaw – the pleasure and validation he found in violence swiftly done – had answered something in the other man’s horror at the arid earth and drawn them together. They had been so angry in their own ways, imperfect, incomplete without training, incomplete without…

He gasped as he felt his flesh strain and split at the edge of the knife, borne down by his own weight. There was nothing clean or efficient in this agony, but then again, uncomplicated mercy had never been his pupil’s style.

\+ + +

‘I want you to teach me.’

‘You have teachers,’ he replied tersely, flat as the grind of his blade against the whetstone.

‘There’s nothing I can learn from them.’

‘You think too highly of yourself.’ He tested the edge of his knife against his thumb, nodded at the fine line of blood he drew. ‘Your pride is a sin and an affront to God.’

‘Is it so wrong to reserve my humility for God and those of my fellow man who earn it?’

‘And how do you presume to judge your fellow men?’ The heresy tainting that otherwise enchanting voice made his hand clench around the hilt of the next knife. Sometimes it was hard to remember that it was the ocean, the extreme distance from civilization that twisted the Child’s tongue rather than anything truly evil; his soul was devout, even if his ideas were muddied with futile resentments.

‘By all manner of things, Priest… the joy they take in life, their devotion to God…’ Heavy boots scraped the floorboards as he drew nearer his table, tripped his dirt-scabbed fingertips over the neat row of his knives. ‘Perhaps, by the nature of your heart.’

His blade slipped off the edge of the whetstone at that pointed switch of pronouns; he tightened his lips, tried to make the loss of control look deliberate. Fortunately, the edge of the knife still drew blood from his thumb, once he pressed hard enough. ‘It is for God alone to measure my heart,’ he replied stiffly.

‘Only God?’ The hand fell away from his weapons as the other man – no, the Child, sank down to his knees at the side of his chair.

He refused to look directly upon the Child, refused to dare any sort of answer, set another knife to the whetstone instead. The agonized whisper of steel honing itself to razor sharpness soothed the silence hanging thick in the room for a time, not nearly long enough – in truth, the knife was not in need of sharpening. He tested the edge all the same, drew another thin trace of blood.

‘Isn’t there a better way to test your steel, Priest?’

‘Perhaps.’ He set the knife aside. ‘But it’s not just the blade I am testing.’

‘Then why test yourself?’

The rapt hush of the question made him immediately regret his words. ‘Penance,’ he explained shortly, watching the blood swell and seep across the pad of his thumb. He hoped the lack of further explanation would discourage further questioning that may bring them too close to the contested territory of that aforementioned heart.

Absorbed as he was in his sin and blood, he couldn’t anticipate those long fingers with their dirty fingernails closing around his palm.

He watched mutely as curious green eyes appeared to count the fine cuts splitting the pad of his thumb. That gaze shifted to hold his own as he kept tugging his hand ever closer, pressed his bleeding thumb to the centre of his brow. The significance of the gesture was not lost on him, and it was perhaps his own instinct that drew the deliberate vertical line of blood down the naked bridge of his nose.

‘Teach me,’ the Child insisted again, quieter yet stronger than before. ‘If I’m so proud, teach me humility. Train me to obey without question if it pleases you.’

‘It’s not a question of what pleases me, my Child, but what serves the Church and God.’

That could have been the final word, if he had not given into the temptation that swept his thumb above those thunderous eyebrows, completing the bloodied sign of the cross and marking the other man as his own.

\+ + +

He had failed through his own pride that day, damned by foolish flattery to have drawn such devotion out of that unruly boy of the coast and been named his teacher and master, so soon after his own arrival at the centre. It was a purpose that gave him strength, an agency he thought he had lost the same day he had been taken from Shannon and the child they had been far too young and stupid to bear.

He had told his disciple about Shannon, of course, as he had confessed and heard confession from all his brothers and sisters in arms. There were no secrets among the Priesthood and no cause for shame in the memory of a girl who had been his best friend since childhood. They were close enough to have shared everything including their first fumbling touches, awkward experimentation that accelerated too quickly and planted the seed of Lucy inside her.

Lucy had sealed the bond of their friendship in a way that passion never would; she could have been the foundation of an ordinary life if the clergy had not dragged him away. Before that separation, he could have sustained his life on familiarity and duty without tempting the sort of sinful thoughts that flourished in the rapid-fire dance of bodies and blades beneath the open sky. The Child he gained in place of a daughter raised those thoughts to the surface with every blow, every bruise built up in their training to stain the skin beneath his robes. He had smoldered with shame at his weakness, but burned brighter still the day his disciple was anointed as Priest. The fire they shared as Brothers was far more destructive than his guilt, from the shelter of a shared blaze on nighttime patrols to the oil lamp thrown down at his feet in this rail car.

 _Burn_ … His head jerked upright from where it had fallen defeated against his chest. He sucked in a ragged breath, gasped through a fresh fit of coughing as thick smoke filled his lungs. Blood still coated his tongue with a metallic bitterness, doing nothing to slake the familiar thirst of too many days spent in the waste.

He never did see the ocean, but he thought he understood its attraction now that he had tasted the salt of his Brother’s skin.

 _Forgive me, Father…_ He gave his head a groggy shake, eyes watering as the rail car grew dark with smoke. His lungs ached, dull counterpoint to the sharp throb of his pinned shoulder. The knife penetrating his body screamed for all the times he had let their vows inhibit their lust, every time he had held them back at the precipice of fingers and tongues and prayers uttered in low, unholy tones.

He prayed now, though for what he did not dare wonder.

If not vengeance from a Brother who constantly craved more, this wound was punishment from the God who had witnessed their embraces. They had been so brazen in the relative safety of daylight patrols, too quick to shed all but their most essential weapons whenever they tangled in the dust his Brother had always reviled. Even their cloaks spread beneath them couldn’t keep the white sand from coating the sweating planes of their bodies. It had always made his Brother’s olive skin seem ghostly pale in the sunlight, lean torso and long thighs starkly interrupted by the black straps of his weapon sheaths as he strained and shuddered into his touch.

The last time he had seen his Brother like that had been mere days before Sola Mira, returning from standard patrol to receive their orders for the raid. They had dismounted for water, passing a canteen between them until an accidental spill led to a scowl, a smirk, a sweeping kick that soon had them sparring, as much to ease the tension in their bones as it was to build that coiled energy back up for a different purpose.

He had fought playfully at first, smiling broadly as he tested the reactions of his Brother’s training against his fists but some shadow had crossed between them, some unknowable anger that had made his Brother fight back in earnest, teeth bared and eyes wild. There had been no stopping him, not until he started to respond with equal force: eventually, with greater force. He made him bleed, ruthlessly pinned him down to the ground and bound his wrists with the steel beads of his rosary and…

Heat that had nothing to do with the fire licking his boots crawled across his skin, sick with sin. God had been nowhere to be found inside him that day; the heat of the high sun above had boiled his blood, that and the spark of defiance in his Brother’s eye.

 _Do it,_ he hissed, not remotely humbled by his bleeding lip or the bound hands trapped beneath him. A strong leg snaked around his waist, dragged him down and shoved their bodies flush together. _Take me… teach me,_ he added with a deadly grin, knowing full well how to claw beneath the skin of his former mentor, knowing the private taunt would lead to torn clothing, to biting kisses that made those full lips bleed their sacrifice across his greedy tongue.

He would take blood as happily as water or wine now. His mouth was so dry, his lungs screamed for oxygen, his knife nearly muted to an echo of regret deep in his flesh.

His knife…

He had used his knife to shred his Brother’s clothes away, far easier than fighting his shirt down those bound arms. He laid that sweating, writhing body bare as efficiently as he skinned the rare beasts that occasionally drifted into the clergy snares and provided their only taste of fresh meat. Every flicker of his Brother’s eyelashes, every insistent tug of those thighs around his hips encouraged each transgression and begged for worse.

 _Is it so different, so wrong?_ He parted his legs wider, curled effortlessly upward with all the strength of his trained abdominal muscles to drag his lips over his sweating neck. _I’ve taken your fists, your whip… I can take your cock as well…_

There was so little, too little difference between all those things. The stirring of his groin had been a constant companion of their practice sessions, a deficiency he accommodated as he would a sprained ankle or broken wrist. As for the whip…

He winced at the errant twitch and throb between his legs, something in his body starting to rebel against the helplessness and the smoke choking his will. Such a spirited pupil as his Child had demanded punishment; it was his duty as a Priest and nothing more, nothing that should have lead to a shared bunk afterwards. Nothing that should have sent his lips chasing every lash mark on his disciple’s naked back, lapping up every note of pain, almost an apology.

 _Why do you stay if you hate the clergy so much?_ It was a dangerous question, one he had whispered into the skin between his Child’s delicate ear and his brutally shorn hair.

An ironic smile had twisted the lips that gave his answer. _The vampire would kill me faster than the clergy could,_ he had murmured. _Better to hunt the evil that would kill me quick, not the one that waits to kill me slow._

Seeing what had become of his Child, the man who was his Brother and more, he recoiled at that reasoning, that reckless confidence. The vampire had not only vanquished him, but commandeered his living soul as he had feared the clergy might. He was caught between two worlds, perverted and indoctrinated all at once.

He had no idea if it would take murder or his surrender to set him free once more.

Surrender had never been an option. Even on that last day, with that body begging beneath his own, he had never succumbed to the urge to fuck his Brother into the dirt and perdition itself. He had held him firmly in place, suckled bruises into his throat and chest and rode the slick sweat of his body – flesh to flesh, hardness to hardness without the sacrilege of penetration.

His Brother had always said it would take more water to wash the world clean than any he had seen in his ocean and _oh_ , he had moved like the tide he could only imagine from inside the dark of a barrel. Even when pinned beneath him, bound but never helpless, he rolled into their rut like an endless wave, tempestuous and wet as they came together and soaked the desert with their lust.

With an ever-heavier burden of effort, he opened his eyes and took in the burning ruin threatening to consume him. No amount of water would free him from this fire.

There had been a moment, up above on the roof of this speeding time bomb that kept shifting beneath their feet as they fought. Beneath the open sky and eyes of God, the creature his Brother had become bled poisonous words ( _you let go_ ) that killed his breath more swiftly than the blows that struck every pressure point he had ever taught him.

 _Why Lucy?_ It had been a stupid, selfish thing to ask but in that pause when they had found themselves entangled, when he had fought the dark thing down onto his back and found his fingers itching for his broken rosary, he needed to remind himself of his purpose. _Why did you take her?_

He shuddered with a fresh surge of pain, feeling the knife in his shoulder biting as deep as the fangs that had flashed at him in a grin, so sharp and white.

 _To bring you back to me._ Bad enough if that had been the end of it. But it wasn’t enough, not for him.

 _She has your scent,_ he had murmured, a low growling breath. _I bet she tastes like you too._

A spike of adrenaline kicked through him as the taunt twisted its way through his memory, sharper and more urgent than the pain in his shoulder. He couldn’t begin to guess the depth of truth in that threat but the threat alone was enough. The lips that had uttered it belonged to a stranger now, possessed by a madness he had never had the chance to tame.

If that demon had wanted him dead, he would not have been left alive to suffer as he was now. He had been left to bleed, to burn but not to die. Not yet. Not when his Brother still waited on him to choose between a child he barely knew or one he knew too well.

As he closed one hand around his cross and the other around the hilt of the knife, he prayed for the strength to know which of the two was in greater need of salvation.


End file.
